crank up
"crank-up" is a 7-letter English headword indexed on PlainSpell.
The verdict
“crank up” is uncommon English (outside the top frequency list), classed as a verb. The kind of spelling people second-guess.
- Unranked
- below top-frequency English
- 8
- letters
According to Wiktionary data (CC BY-SA, analyzed September 3, 2026) - To start something mechanical, an act that often used to involve cranking.
Corpus desk
Index EN-crank-up · crank up · English
crank up · unranked · 0 variants · 0 confusables
- FREQ-UNRANKED Unranked
- LEN-LONG 8 letters
- VOW-2 2 vowels
- CONFUS-0 No pairs
- VAR-0 0 variants
- BOOK-THIN "C" thin
- PHOTO-UNK Peer pending
Read with this headword: Spelling guide for this pattern
Desk codes from Wiktionary headword shape, FrequencyWords rank tier, confusable-pair count, generated misspelling depth, letter-cohort book size, and photo-finish peer. Not a difficulty grade.
| Property | Value |
|---|---|
| Headword | crank up |
| Language | English |
| Part of speech | Verb |
| Letters | 8 |
| Misspellings tracked | 0 |
| Confusable pairs | 0 |
| Source | Wiktionary (kaikki.org) |
Long-tail rank of “crank up” in English
Rare enough to double-check
crank up is uncommon English outside the top frequency list, classed as averb. Rarity is why readers land here mid-draft. 6 senses are on record.
Zero misspellings are on record for crank up in our index, typically a sign the spelling maps closely to how the word sounds. It is not paired with a close-neighbour confusable in our dataset, since nothing in our dataset looks or sounds close enough to cause mix-ups.
Wiktionary doesn't record an etymology for this headword, so spelling patterns must be inferred from the word's phoneme-to-grapheme mapping rather than from a documented borrowing chain. The correct English form is crank up, spelled C-R-A-N-K- -U-P.
Definition
- 1To start something mechanical, an act that often used to involve cranking.
- 2To muster up the mental energy to do something.
- 3To prepare (something).
- 4To increase, as the volume, power or energy of something.
- 5To describe in praiseworthy terms; to promote.
- 6To inject heroin.
Recorded use
Wiktionary examplesThese source excerpts show how crank up appears in context. They illustrate usage; the definition above remains the entry’s reference meaning.
Let's crank up the old motorcycle and take it for a spin.
I kept thinking: this has nothing to do with my interests, with what I believe is a desirable subject for literature. I was doing it as a performance. I kept cranking myself up to perform, to meet the demands of the genre. I know this sounds terribly inartistic.
This word in other languages
Definitions, pronunciation, and etymology for this entry are drawn from Wiktionary via the kaikki.org structured extract (CC BY-SA). See the methodology for how each field is sourced and updated.